3 ms·

This is the kind of political analysis I've come to be very, very critical of lately. It's not even that I disagree with everything here; it's a truism in anthr

This is the kind of political analysis I've come to be very, very critical of lately. It's not even that I disagree with everything here; it's a truism in anthropology that more complex forms of political organization, like states and empires, are substantially less stable than less complex ones. The author just makes assertions without providing evidence or demonstrating his thought process in any way. And a lot of it is just plain wrong when you take a moment to think it through. For instance: > Over time, legal systems seem to similarly become more complex, interdependent, and resistant to change. Sometimes legal systems are “refactored” to increase flexibility, such as when the Roman emperor Justinian arranged for a restructuring and simplification of the Roman legal code. This Justinian code was later adapted by Napolean [sic], who spread it across Europe, after which European conquests spread it across the world This the kind of generalization you often see from dabblers and rarely see from actual historians or even amateurs with a solid understanding of history. The complexity and rigidity of legal systems in various parts of the world varies greatly depending on the era, the health of the political and socioeconomic systems in that era, whether or not the systems in question are based in civil law or common law, etc. And the idea that there's a straight line from Justinian to Napoleon is ludicrous as well. It glosses over 1300 years of legal history showing large fluctuations in the level of legal complexity because it's either inconvenient for the author to deal with or because the author is unaware of it. Regardless of the reason for the omission, it's a sign of the author's laziness. I get that this "paper" (author's words, not mine) is just a blog post but IMO this is lazy, reductionist thought and we should demand better when people want to chime in on political or economic issues.

gone35 5y ago
> […] this is lazy, should demand better when people want to chime in on political or economic issues. Or entrepreneurship, or nutrition, or (yelp) underestablished engineering issues too! Carelessly thought leadership should go the way of "statistical significance" / p < 0.05 sophistry of yore.
- gone35 5y ago
  P.D.: Related — Dick Feynman on 'experts' and "pseudoscience": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo
noobermin 5y ago
Was going to say, a comment on the page was really good but it looks like you just copy and pasted it there. This point, that the premise is not even really examined says a lot, ironically on a site called "overcoming bias."
- kieselguhr_kid 5y ago
  Actually, whoever posted that copied this comment (glad my timestamp is first edit: just so we can avoid any drama over authorship). Which is fine, IDC, but you telling me it was there is the first I heard of it.
the_af 5y ago
Agreed with your comment. I find this kind of amateurish blog post typical of sites like LessWrong, OvercomingBias, or the writings of minor internet celebrity Eliezer Yudkowsky. Somehow they remain popular in nerd circles.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  It seems like a pretty universal phenomenon to me - are Dr. Oz or the average newspaper editorial any better?
  - akiselev 5y ago
    Same scam, different artist.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Nerds consistently seem to undervalue actual expertise in the humanities and instead assume that they can just work through these ideas on their own with limited training. And because so many people are interested in these topics but are also uneducated, they find amateur analysis to be convincing.
  - golden_feather 5y ago
    I think it is less an issue of STEM vs humanities and more of an issue of empiricism vs idealism/rationalism. Biologists or physicians might disparage the humanities (and often they definitely do), but by training they are wary of any great theory of anything extracted from three anecdotes. Whilst in this circles there are people who don't deal with empirical evidence at all (programmers) or who do so in fields where you can safely generalize from a single piece of properly obtained evidence, like physicists. Another problem of non-empirical science, or sciences that happen only in the lab, is that nobody prepares you to deal with evidences of uncertain, or definitely poor, quality. A biologist knows that a lot of samples from the field are taken by humans and there is some margin of error. Or maybe they are contaminated. Or maybe conserved poorly. And so on. So they can perfectly understand historians who say how much of our "data" about pre-1900 societies are poorly collected, guesses themselves, or manipulated for political aims, or simply modern inferences based on archeological data but subject to interpretation. Instead a programmer or a physicist looks at a graph with "number of laws, 1000-1900" and "GDP per capita,1000-1900" and think that the quantities represented are actual, objective data and that there are not 18 different and equally sensible estimations that would make the graph look completely different. Combining these two factors, you get all these posts that supposedly explain the iron laws of every society ever with a bit of deductive logic, some "common sense" arguments the reader can relate to, and three graphs that show correlation and not causation between variables nobody actually measured
darawk 5y ago
> This the kind of generalization you often see from dabblers and rarely see from actual historians or even amateurs with a solid understanding of history. The complexity and rigidity of legal systems in various parts of the world varies greatly depending on the era, the health of the political and socioeconomic systems in that era, whether or not the systems in question are based in civil law or common law, etc. And the idea that there's a straight line from Justinian to Napoleon is ludicrous as well. It glosses over 1300 years of legal history showing large fluctuations in the level of legal complexity because it's either inconvenient for the author to deal with or because the author is unaware of it. Regardless of the reason for the omission, it's a sign of the author's laziness. I don't really get this criticism in response to what you quoted. He's talking about the dynamics, not the state. Your statement that the level of complexity waxes and wanes in different eras is perfectly compatible with a dynamic trend towards greater complexity in the absence of exogenous shocks (e.g. revolution, war, etc). You seem to be confusing noise around the trend with its structural non-existence. The fact that things move around and occupy different levels at different times does not negate the existence of statistical structure.
- kieselguhr_kid 5y ago
  I'm not convinced that the trend towards greater complexity and rot exists in and of itself. That smacks of a teleological interpretation of human history and one that's grounded in a very brief and aberrant period of our species' history. I also don't think that periods of fluctuation are noise around the trend, but rather part of a larger historical trend itself. I'm not saying the author is completely wrong: it's obvious (and kind of a surface level observation) that sometimes complex systems become less well-adapted to their circumstances. But the author doesn't make the case that the bodies responsible for international cooperation are a world government in any meaningful sense of the word or that their existence would constitute a point of failure (would the collapse of the World Trade Organization really threaten human civilization?). He also doesn't support his argument, think it through in any careful way, or even describe the mechanisms by which rot occurs. I stand by my assertion that this is lazy thinking that makes broad generalizations about human systems and applies them without any kind of careful analysis.
DeathArrow 5y ago
The Napoleonic Code which most of the world's law systems are based on was based itself on the Roman law system. Pretty much how modern geometry is based on the discoveries of ancient geometers like Euclid or Archimedes.
- Bayart 5y ago
  The structure of the Napoleonic Code and some of its content originates in the Code of Justinian, through the mediation of Southern French written law, but *a lot* of it also comes from the Custom of Paris and all the regional customs aggregated around it, that is French common law.
ItsMonkk 5y ago
It's a case of top-down thinking vs bottom-up thinking. Historians build from bedrock and are able to directly work out causation, whereas these Programmers with a hobby in studying other systems don't get the feedback at that level of nuance, but they get an intuition from building many different smaller systems and getting plenty of feedback from those. They take the learnings they got building software and apply it to other systems. This is important - as feedback drives learning - and software provides the most feedback ever, and thus I would argue that programmers are the best systems thinkers we've ever had. The reality is we need both, as Silicon Valley might say, middle-out thinking. And I don't criticize the author or yourself for pushing their viewpoint, because the only way we move forward is bringing the Historians with the Systems thinkers. That's what this comment section is for. Better still, if we can find a Historian Hobbyist Systems thinker who can play both parts, like David Graeber did for the topics he was interested in. Although even he got criticized for basically your exact argument here. So don't criticize the author for having a top-down viewpoint, give him concrete examples of his examples where he is wrong, point him in the direction of books you know that cover the things that he is talking about, he will appreciate it. He doesn't mean to be lazy, but it takes skill to know those things, and the skill he has acquired is elsewhere. This is the power of specialization. Does law act like software, where a law written at the wrong abstraction level spirals out of control? What causes code and law to metastasize and be unable to refactor? Why was git, a source control system written in 2 weeks by Linus able to dominate the software space, when Microsoft had a team working for years on their source control system? What software are examples of systems that evolve over time? What software builds up so much spaghetti that it is best to throw it away? Joel Spolsky's argument is that answer is never, and refactoring is always preferable to starting fresh. Is that a good argument that laws should keep going forever? How do we know we found the law equivalent to git? There are many many more questions to ask, let's continue asking them.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > thus I would argue that programmers are the best systems thinkers we've ever had. Certainly, many of the best systems thinkers are programmers. Most programmers are pretty poor systems thinkers, though, and systems thinking doesn't do a lot of good if you don't have a deep understanding of the elements of the system. > So don't criticize the author for having a top-down viewpoint, give him concrete examples of his examples where he is wrong, point him in the direction of books you know that cover the things that he is talking about, he will appreciate it. Did the author engage the person you are chastising as an educator?

gone35 5y ago

> […] this is lazy, should demand better when people want to chime in on political or economic issues. Or entrepreneurship, or nutrition, or (yelp) underestablished engineering issues too! Carelessly thought leadership should go the way of "statistical significance" / p < 0.05 sophistry of yore.

gone35 5y ago
P.D.: Related — Dick Feynman on 'experts' and "pseudoscience": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo

noobermin 5y ago

Was going to say, a comment on the page was really good but it looks like you just copy and pasted it there. This point, that the premise is not even really examined says a lot, ironically on a site called "overcoming bias."

kieselguhr_kid 5y ago
Actually, whoever posted that copied this comment (glad my timestamp is first edit: just so we can avoid any drama over authorship). Which is fine, IDC, but you telling me it was there is the first I heard of it.

the_af 5y ago

Agreed with your comment. I find this kind of amateurish blog post typical of sites like LessWrong, OvercomingBias, or the writings of minor internet celebrity Eliezer Yudkowsky. Somehow they remain popular in nerd circles.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
It seems like a pretty universal phenomenon to me - are Dr. Oz or the average newspaper editorial any better?
- akiselev 5y ago
  Same scam, different artist.
UncleMeat 5y ago
Nerds consistently seem to undervalue actual expertise in the humanities and instead assume that they can just work through these ideas on their own with limited training. And because so many people are interested in these topics but are also uneducated, they find amateur analysis to be convincing.
- golden_feather 5y ago
  I think it is less an issue of STEM vs humanities and more of an issue of empiricism vs idealism/rationalism. Biologists or physicians might disparage the humanities (and often they definitely do), but by training they are wary of any great theory of anything extracted from three anecdotes. Whilst in this circles there are people who don't deal with empirical evidence at all (programmers) or who do so in fields where you can safely generalize from a single piece of properly obtained evidence, like physicists. Another problem of non-empirical science, or sciences that happen only in the lab, is that nobody prepares you to deal with evidences of uncertain, or definitely poor, quality. A biologist knows that a lot of samples from the field are taken by humans and there is some margin of error. Or maybe they are contaminated. Or maybe conserved poorly. And so on. So they can perfectly understand historians who say how much of our "data" about pre-1900 societies are poorly collected, guesses themselves, or manipulated for political aims, or simply modern inferences based on archeological data but subject to interpretation. Instead a programmer or a physicist looks at a graph with "number of laws, 1000-1900" and "GDP per capita,1000-1900" and think that the quantities represented are actual, objective data and that there are not 18 different and equally sensible estimations that would make the graph look completely different. Combining these two factors, you get all these posts that supposedly explain the iron laws of every society ever with a bit of deductive logic, some "common sense" arguments the reader can relate to, and three graphs that show correlation and not causation between variables nobody actually measured

darawk 5y ago

> This the kind of generalization you often see from dabblers and rarely see from actual historians or even amateurs with a solid understanding of history. The complexity and rigidity of legal systems in various parts of the world varies greatly depending on the era, the health of the political and socioeconomic systems in that era, whether or not the systems in question are based in civil law or common law, etc. And the idea that there's a straight line from Justinian to Napoleon is ludicrous as well. It glosses over 1300 years of legal history showing large fluctuations in the level of legal complexity because it's either inconvenient for the author to deal with or because the author is unaware of it. Regardless of the reason for the omission, it's a sign of the author's laziness. I don't really get this criticism in response to what you quoted. He's talking about the dynamics, not the state. Your statement that the level of complexity waxes and wanes in different eras is perfectly compatible with a dynamic trend towards greater complexity in the absence of exogenous shocks (e.g. revolution, war, etc). You seem to be confusing noise around the trend with its structural non-existence. The fact that things move around and occupy different levels at different times does not negate the existence of statistical structure.

kieselguhr_kid 5y ago
I'm not convinced that the trend towards greater complexity and rot exists in and of itself. That smacks of a teleological interpretation of human history and one that's grounded in a very brief and aberrant period of our species' history. I also don't think that periods of fluctuation are noise around the trend, but rather part of a larger historical trend itself. I'm not saying the author is completely wrong: it's obvious (and kind of a surface level observation) that sometimes complex systems become less well-adapted to their circumstances. But the author doesn't make the case that the bodies responsible for international cooperation are a world government in any meaningful sense of the word or that their existence would constitute a point of failure (would the collapse of the World Trade Organization really threaten human civilization?). He also doesn't support his argument, think it through in any careful way, or even describe the mechanisms by which rot occurs. I stand by my assertion that this is lazy thinking that makes broad generalizations about human systems and applies them without any kind of careful analysis.

DeathArrow 5y ago

The Napoleonic Code which most of the world's law systems are based on was based itself on the Roman law system. Pretty much how modern geometry is based on the discoveries of ancient geometers like Euclid or Archimedes.

Bayart 5y ago
The structure of the Napoleonic Code and some of its content originates in the Code of Justinian, through the mediation of Southern French written law, but *a lot* of it also comes from the Custom of Paris and all the regional customs aggregated around it, that is French common law.

ItsMonkk 5y ago

It's a case of top-down thinking vs bottom-up thinking. Historians build from bedrock and are able to directly work out causation, whereas these Programmers with a hobby in studying other systems don't get the feedback at that level of nuance, but they get an intuition from building many different smaller systems and getting plenty of feedback from those. They take the learnings they got building software and apply it to other systems. This is important - as feedback drives learning - and software provides the most feedback ever, and thus I would argue that programmers are the best systems thinkers we've ever had. The reality is we need both, as Silicon Valley might say, middle-out thinking. And I don't criticize the author or yourself for pushing their viewpoint, because the only way we move forward is bringing the Historians with the Systems thinkers. That's what this comment section is for. Better still, if we can find a Historian Hobbyist Systems thinker who can play both parts, like David Graeber did for the topics he was interested in. Although even he got criticized for basically your exact argument here. So don't criticize the author for having a top-down viewpoint, give him concrete examples of his examples where he is wrong, point him in the direction of books you know that cover the things that he is talking about, he will appreciate it. He doesn't mean to be lazy, but it takes skill to know those things, and the skill he has acquired is elsewhere. This is the power of specialization. Does law act like software, where a law written at the wrong abstraction level spirals out of control? What causes code and law to metastasize and be unable to refactor? Why was git, a source control system written in 2 weeks by Linus able to dominate the software space, when Microsoft had a team working for years on their source control system? What software are examples of systems that evolve over time? What software builds up so much spaghetti that it is best to throw it away? Joel Spolsky's argument is that answer is never, and refactoring is always preferable to starting fresh. Is that a good argument that laws should keep going forever? How do we know we found the law equivalent to git? There are many many more questions to ask, let's continue asking them.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> thus I would argue that programmers are the best systems thinkers we've ever had. Certainly, many of the best systems thinkers are programmers. Most programmers are pretty poor systems thinkers, though, and systems thinking doesn't do a lot of good if you don't have a deep understanding of the elements of the system. > So don't criticize the author for having a top-down viewpoint, give him concrete examples of his examples where he is wrong, point him in the direction of books you know that cover the things that he is talking about, he will appreciate it. Did the author engage the person you are chastising as an educator?